The first United States vessel to reach the lagoon found only charred
remains of a landing stage and several buildings and, at the bottom of the
lagoon, an incoherent mass of wreckage, a twisted and shattered chaos of
steel plates and framework that might possibly have been a perfectly sound
submarine, though sunken, had somebody not been warned in ample time
to permit its destruction through the agency of trinitrotoluene, that
enormously efficient modern explosive nicknamed by British military and
naval experts "T.N.T.," and by the Germans "Trotyl."
XII
RESURRECTION
The early editions of those New York evening newspapers which Lanyard
purchased in Providence, when he changed trains there en route from New
Bedford to New York, carried multi-column and most picturesque accounts of
the _Assyrian_ disaster.
But the whole truth was in none.
Lanyard laid aside the last paper privately satisfied that, for no-doubt
praiseworthy reasons of its own, Washington had seen fit to dictate the
suppression of a number of extremely pertinent circumstances and facts
which could hardly have escaped governmental knowledge.
Pages:
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216